O’Farrell’s prose, as fluent as ever, is more ornate than in earlier books. She alternates passages of plain prose with others rich in musical cadences and lavishly decorated with imagery and heightened vocabulary. A river laps at its banks “with lassitudinous ochre tongues”. A dress speaks a “glossolalia all of its own”, rustling and creaking, becoming an orchestra, or the rigging of a ship. Finely written and vividly imagined, The Marriage Portrait is far from being simplistic, but there is an engaging simplicity to it that makes it feel not quite like a grown-up novel. Rather, it is a very good one to be read, as publishers used to say, by “children of all ages”. Strong's 3708: Properly, to stare at, i.e. to discern clearly; by extension, to attend to; by Hebraism, to experience; passively, to appear. And the king having come in to view those reclining, saw there a man not clothed with wedding clothes, When you are invited by anyone to wedding feasts, do not recline in the first place, lest one more honorable than you might have been invited by him.

The first part of the book is a memoir about the author’s life, partly concerning his bout with cancer and partly about his growing up Ireland as a gay Catholic. I found this part of the book interesting. The title essay A Guest at the Feast is a mini-collection of memory fragments of Inniscorthy, where he grew up, and was published as a Penguin short, whereas nearly all the other essays have appeared in London Review of Books. His father was a teacher, his mother a reader who appears to have had more influence on his early reading life than his father did. Her willingness to break some at least of the controls imposed for religious reasons becomes apparent the day he finds three banned books on top of her wardrobe. this section on censorship resonated with me - Australia in the 1950s and 60s had a ferocious censorship regime and I recall as university student being given special permission to borrow 6 banned books from the university library as they were set for discussion in our politics tutorials: Lady Chatterly's Lover, Tropic of Cancer, Moll Flanders, James Baldwin I can't remember which one now, but it set me off to read several of his works. And then we had free for all discussion about censorship. The middle portion of the book is more about the Roman Catholic Church and the popes of the latter part of the the 20th and the first part of the 21st centuries. While this part of the book might be interesting to someone who grew up Catholic. For me, it was difficult to stay awake listening to the author’s reading of the book, though he reads with a lovely Irish brogue.Tóibín’s personal circumstances give him a unique outlook on many of the public matters discussed in the collection. A Brush with the Law, published in The Dublin Review in 2007, is a fascinating look at the workings of the Supreme Court in 1980s Ireland, which begins when Tóibín is sent to cover, as editor of Magill magazine, David Norris’s constitutional challenge to Ireland’s laws against homosexuality. Tóibín applies his formidable intellect to documenting the twists and turns of the case. We see the rigour of thought and understanding of nuance that made him such a good journalist, inflected with the humanity of personal experience: “To be gay in a repressive society is to have every moment of your life clouded by what is forbidden and what must be secretive.” Throughout the collection, it is the droll, melancholy elegance of the prose that guarantees the reader’s enjoyment.” —John Mullan, The Guardian When someone invites you to a wedding, don't take the place of honor. Maybe someone more important than you was invited.

In one of the essays in A Guest at the Feast, Colm Tóibín declares: “God represents a real problem for the novelist. The novel is happier in a secular space.” He is writing about Marilynne Robinson, a writer skilled, as he says, at “making religious thought easy” – easy for the reader, however unbelieving, to accept. It is a skill he admires. Yet his own novels hardly inhabit a “secular space”. Catholicism is a live presence in all the ones set in Ireland, while his interest in Christian myth even led him, in The Testament of Mary, to create the first-person narrative of Jesus’s mother as she nears death.Tóibín gathers 11 essays that showcase his versatility in this erudite collection of previously published material… this collection places him in that same class. Tóibín’s fans will relish these sharp reflections.” — Publishers Weekly Jesus replied: “A certain man was preparing a great banquet and invited many guests. 17 At the time of the banquet he sent his servant to tell those who had been invited, ‘Come, for everything is now ready.’ When the king came to see the guests, he saw a person who was not dressed in the wedding clothes [provided for the guests].

Whose fan is in his hand, and he will throughly purge his floor, and gather his wheat into the garner; but he will burn up the chaff with unquenchable fire. It’s all very meticulous, even his horror, which is considerable when it comes to the way the bishops covered up for their paedophile priests. On every subject, Tóibín’s writing is what people these days inevitably describe as nuanced, a word that has become a kind of shorthand for expressing a person’s rare ability to understand – or to try to understand – the foibles of others (how sad that this should be thought unusual). But he can be gripping, too. This country that censored the hell out of people’s hearts is so much his territory. If the speed with which the power of the church in Ireland has been undermined is still astonishing, it’s nevertheless important to consider the hold it may continue to have over those citizens – Tóibín is one – who remember when its authority was ironclad. In the end, this is a book of shadows: tumours in testicles, fog in Venice, expensively clad cardinals who may be up to no good.

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That said, what I think is so powerful about Toibin's writing on this topic is how he is able to convey how despite growing away from the church, it still informs and provides the lens through which he processes and sees the world. I myself no longer consider myself Catholic, and yet I could still recite my Sunday prayers and a litany of saints without even thinking. The church on the one hand, taught me valuable life lessons, while at the same time it taught me that it was not a place for people like me. A childhood brought up in the church is not easily forgotten, and the trauma of growing up understanding that you do not belong or are welcome imprints itself on an individual. This is the discordance of the church - how is it that an institution that preaches faith, hope, and love also be the source of so much pain for so many other people? In any case, Toibin is an astute and sensitive writer and his musings on the topic are terrifyingly powerful. His discussion about religion in fiction in general, and Robinson's Gilead series in particular is sufficiently intriguing, illuminating and entertaining that I am going to buy a copy of the book after I've returned the library copy.

These essays- memoir — are FANTASTIC….highly enriched by the audiobook: Toibin couldn’t have read it better. A very good collection of essays, both incredibly personal and with an eye out to the world. Here Tóibín sometimes looks at his own life, but more often looks out at the state of Ireland, its Catholic past and how to come to terms with all the abuse it has inflicted on its youth, the Catholic Church and, obviously, literature. What comes to the fore brilliantly is how his personal relationships sometimes clouded his judgment in the past, but his willingness to look at the truth as it lays in front of him makes him change his mind when it is called for. Whether this regards an Irish writer trying to whitewash his own Nazi past or former teachers (fraters) at boarding school, or the popes past and present, his ideas and thoughts are never facile nor go for cheap shots; whether you agree with him or not, you come away with an enormous awe about his mind and his ethical precision (by which I don't necessarily mean his conclusions, but how he arrives at them - something to learn from). I am a big fan of Colm Tóibín's fiction, so when I saw a collection of his essays, it seemed like a "no-brainer" read to me. Unfortunately, after trying to trudge through this collection, I've learned that just because you like someone's fiction doesn't mean you'll automatically enjoy their nonfiction. When you are invited by someone to a wedding feast, do not recline at the place of honor, lest someone more highly regarded than you be invited by him,Particularly moving to me — and it seems my opinion was shared by the other kindle readers who highlighted the same passages — are the stories of Colm Toibin’s mother. A woman with very little formal education but a lifetime love and need for reading. It’s deeply moving as a portrait of his mother, and, implicitly, of all the women denied education throughout history - almost all of us. I can only imagine the joy his mother must have and would have felt at Colm Toibin’s utter, deserved success.